Can you recognize a city without seeing its landmarks? And if the buildings that once made different cities visually distinct begin to share the same architectural language, what happens to the way we remember where we have been?
There is no CN Tower in this photograph.
No famous monument. No street sign telling you where you are. Nothing that immediately announces Toronto or even Canada.
There is an unfinished building, a tower crane, a second crane disappearing beyond the frame, and layers of residential architecture extending into the distance.
Still, the image feels familiar.
That familiarity is what interests me.
Because I don’t think we remember cities as maps.
We remember them as collections of images.
The city without its landmarks
When we talk about the visual identity of a city, we tend to reach immediately for its icons.
New York has the Empire State Building. Chicago has its towers along the river. Toronto has the CN Tower. San Francisco has the Golden Gate Bridge.
These structures are useful symbols precisely because they compress an enormous place into a single recognizable image.
But most of our lives in cities don’t happen beside landmarks.
They happen between ordinary buildings.
We remember the brick apartment across from a friend’s house. The particular colour of concrete in a subway station. A narrow street that suddenly opens toward the sky. Fire escapes. Balconies. Storefronts. Parking structures. The reflection of evening light against a glass tower.
None of these things necessarily deserve a postcard.
Together, they may be more important to our memory of a city than the postcard ever was.
As a photographer, I find myself increasingly interested in these smaller visual signals.
Sometimes I can look at a photograph without any obvious landmark and still have a feeling about where it was made.
Not because I recognize a building, but because I recognize a pattern.
Learning a city visually
Spend enough time somewhere and you begin to memorize it without trying.
You learn the scale of its streets. The relationship between old and new construction. The materials that repeat from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. The distance between buildings. The way the sun reaches the street—or doesn’t.
Eventually, these observations become instinctive.
You stop actively looking for them.
This is close to an idea explored through psychogeography: that the physical form of a city influences how we experience it emotionally and how we move through it.
I am interested in a slightly different extension of that idea.
How does the city become an image inside our memory?
I don’t think that internal image is particularly accurate.
It is assembled from fragments.
A corner here. A facade there. The view from an apartment window. A building you passed every morning for three years without ever learning its name.
Photography does something similar. It removes a fragment from the enormous complexity of a city and asks us to look at it as though that fragment might somehow describe the whole.
When cities begin to resemble one another
Looking at contemporary development across North America raises another question.
What happens when the fragments start becoming similar?
Travel between major North American cities today and certain architectural elements repeat: glazed towers, podiums, balconies, curtain walls, repetitive residential grids, large mixed-use developments and increasingly dense vertical neighbourhoods.
This isn’t to say the buildings are identical, or that contemporary architecture has somehow erased regional differences. Climate, regulation, economics, materials, planning and architectural ambition continue to produce very different buildings.
But at the scale of everyday perception, there is an increasing visual familiarity.
Sometimes you encounter a new neighbourhood and feel you have already seen it somewhere else.
That feeling is strange.
Because architecture has traditionally helped us locate ourselves.
Now some of it can make us momentarily unsure of where we are.
A city made from repetition
That is partly why I chose this photograph.
The image contains repetition everywhere.
The glass-block facade repeats across the lower buildings. Concrete floor plates stack above one another. Openings multiply. Balconies project from the structure. Cranes stretch horizontally across the sky.
There is no single object asking to become the subject.
Instead, the city itself becomes a pattern.
And perhaps this is increasingly how contemporary urban life looks from above: not a collection of isolated architectural objects, but systems growing into one another.
One building becomes the foreground of another.
One person’s balcony becomes another person’s view.
One development changes the light reaching the building beside it.
The identity of the city exists somewhere between all of them.
Architecture as memory
What fascinates me is how quickly these unfamiliar structures eventually become familiar.
During construction, a building can feel intrusive simply because our memory of that place does not contain it yet.
Then we adapt.
We walk past it enough times.
We see its windows illuminated at night. Someone we know moves into it. A restaurant opens at street level. A tree planted beside it becomes larger. The building begins collecting ordinary human events.
Eventually, it becomes difficult to imagine the street without it.
Architecture has entered memory.
This connects to something I was thinking about while making the first photograph in this series: cities are continuously becoming something else.
But change has another side.
Every time the city gains a new image, an older image becomes harder to remember.
The photograph as evidence
Photography has always had a complicated relationship with this.
We photograph cities partly because they change.
A photograph can preserve a building, but it also preserves relationships that may disappear: the empty lot beside it, the amount of sky above it, the shadow it cast before another tower arrived.
Sometimes the most valuable thing in an architectural photograph twenty years later isn’t the building we deliberately photographed.
It’s something at the edge of the frame.
Something nobody thought was about to disappear.
That makes me wonder about photographs like this one.
Today I see an unfinished development. I notice the cranes, the exposed concrete, the incomplete upper floors and the absence of inhabitants.
Years from now, I may look at exactly the same photograph differently.
Perhaps the strange thing will no longer be the building under construction.
Perhaps it will be everything around it.
Remembering where we are
Cities need to change. Their identities have never been fixed, and preserving every familiar image would mean preventing the city from continuing to live.
But I think there is value in paying attention to what happens visually while that change takes place.
Because a city is not only infrastructure, housing, streets and buildings.
It is also an enormous collection of remembered images.
We carry those images with us, usually without realizing it.
And sometimes, when returning to a neighbourhood after several years, we experience a peculiar moment: we know exactly where we are, but it no longer looks like the place we remember.
Maybe that is one of the quietest ways architecture changes us.
The city can remain in exactly the same geographic location while slowly moving somewhere else in our memory.